Saturday, February 26, 2011

Good Stuff House is Matt Christensen and Mike Weis of Zelienople in collaboration with former Souled America guitarist Scott Tuma. Here we have their only two albums to date, "Good Stuff House" and "Endless Bummer." On both, Tuma leads the way, spinning out vast, bottomless guitar nocturnes. Weis and Christensen add complex atmospherics, decayed percussion, hidden vocals, all taking Tuma's guitar drone down dark corridors and out into sun drenched deserts. In some ways GSH is a haunted continuation of Souled America, a fog drenched, smoke filled take on Americana. Think of these as crumbling, droning country albums washed out almost to oblivion. At times this influence is more pronounced than others. On the band's first, self-titled album the opening track is propelled forward by an almost jauntily strummed banjo with layers of pulsing atmospherics in the background. Both albums here are culled from various tapes of improvised live sets and supplemented by studio work and it shows: both feel like explorations into far off places, acoustic guitars and banjos and piano and snarled percussion consumed and overwhelmed by vast undulations of white noise, oceanic echos, caverns of reverb, lost voices swimming out of the ether. And yet, despite how nearly annihilated it is, the Americana influence is undeniably there, sometimes lost altogether to the crumbling static and decomposing reverb but at others rearing up out of the welter. Haunting, fantastic stuff.

Saturday, February 5, 2011

Here we have two albums by New Zealand's legendary Birchville Cat Motel aka Campbell Kneale (now known as Our Love Will Destroy the World) representing two very different sides of the same artist.

First is the two disc "Beautiful Speck Triumph," a drifting cosmic journey over two hours long. The album starts with a dark hum drifting beneath crackling, clicking machine noise and grimy static and whining feedback which swells until it suddenly cuts away and the original hum, grumbling and decaying, spins out the rest of the track, leading into the second piece, an 18-minute excursion that begins with clattering wind chimes and field recordings and spindly static skree, all of which is slowly consumed by a nefarious static blast which in turn is devoured and blotted out by creaking electro-decay and, seemingly out of nowhere, a droning organ which dominates in the third and final track of disc 1, almost an homage of sorts to Star of the Lid, a drifting, glowing soundscape with rustling percussion and a whistful tendril of crackling static seeping through for the first several minutes before surrendering to the organ and a mournful, lowing violin.

The second disc also begins darkly, a constant, resonant organ line with other organs, whispering feedback, and electronic bleeps, a very deep, organic sound piece of drone. This leads into the second track, built on the same single organ note but this time with layers of dense, wordless vocal haze and crunching, grinding percussion, the same static crackle ever present. Finally the music falls away altogether and we're left with a field recording - perhaps taken in a crowded restaurant - and analog decay. This in turn bleeds into the final, 36-minute track in which that organ drone rears its head once more, bigger and angrier than ever, almost roaring as it builds on top of itself, layer upon gauzy, thrumming layer, a giant wash of noise, percussion plodding and a guitar squalling throughout. The final ten minutes are a serene coda, chirping birds sing along with a delicately plucked guitar until it all fades into silence. The whole album is massive and beautiful, an enveloping sonic experience.

This blog is intended to help people hear great music. While most of the posts here will include download links, these are meant to be purely introductory. If you download anything from this blog and like it please seriously considering buying a physical copy or, if that's not possible as much of what will be posted here is out of print, buy something else by the artist. I will always provide links to labels and the like to facilitate this. If you are an artist or run a label and see your work/a release you've put out here and would not like it shared, just leave a comment or send an email and the link will be removed immediately. Thanks and enjoy the music.